Google’s Brin Calls China Censorship A “Net Negative”

China censorship damaged us, Google founders admit at The Guardian has a quote from one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, when asked about Google censoring content in China, “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.” This is reportedly the strongest regret remark made by Google on their dealings in China. […]

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China censorship damaged us, Google founders admit at The Guardian has a quote from one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, when asked about Google censoring content in China, “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.”


This is reportedly the strongest regret remark made by Google on their dealings in China. Forbes.com expands with more quotes from Brin, where he clarifies, that he felt oppression while in the Soviet Union and would “never have wanted to compromise in that direction.” Brin was arguing that some information is better than no information.

Philipp Lenssen also has good commentary on these statements.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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